


many deaths i'll sing

by ronsenboobi (snewvilliurs)



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Jacob-centric, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-25 14:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16662735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snewvilliurs/pseuds/ronsenboobi
Summary: It was like stepping into hellfire and taking a drink with the devil, and the devil poured the spirits himself and called his efforts the heroics of the bravest man in London.a character study of jacob frye throughout the events of sequences 8 and 9. spoilers, obviously.





	many deaths i'll sing

**Author's Note:**

> title from the poem _gliding o'er all_ by walt whitman.
> 
> please note that while roth's name and presence feature heavily in this, i personally have no interest in expanding on their relationship as a "proper ship" past what has been confirmed by the writers re: roth's feelings and what it means for jacob's bisexuality, so if that's what you're looking for, this probably isn't the place for you. dude super creeps me out. that said, i felt like there was so much left to be explored about jacob's psyche in those later events, so while this is pretty sulky, it was incredibly fun to write and i hope the result is as interesting. happy reading!
> 
> (also, i only realized that fun and games and final act happen all in the same day literally right after i finished writing this and i didn't want to scrap the scenes i wrote on the assumption that the play was the next day, so i hope you guys will forgive me for the slight divergence from canon!)

**I.     bedfellows**  

 _The bravest man in London,_ he said.

Maxwell Roth was easy enough to read, from the start: a grandiose egomaniac of a dandy whose theatricality came as a surprise, when juxtaposed with the knowledge that he was one of the most dangerous men of London’s criminal underworld. It was enough to throw Jacob off-balance, like a discordant chord being struck midway through a dance he thought he knew—Roth was too bright, too lively, too familiar by half. Jacob had expected a lot of things when he made up his mind to meet with the head of the Blighters, and Roth was, by and large, very few of them.

London had been a sea of red when Jacob and Evie stepped off the train from Croydon; since then, he’d made it his own personal mission to remedy it, and he’d built the Rooks from the ground up to make it happen. There was an irony in knowing that it was a sort of forceful bloodletting that would lessen the Blighters’—and, by extension, the Templars’—hold on the city and make it so that Jacob’s life was less full of that red, and then he walked right into the lion's den. There was red _everywhere_ he looked: the outside of the Alhambra, the thugs who surrounded it, the curtains, the velvet carpet. The splash of red around Roth’s neck.

It was like stepping into hellfire and taking a drink with the devil, and the devil poured the spirits himself and called his efforts the heroics of the bravest man in London.

Not reckless, not misguided, not sloppy. Brave. Such a small, unassuming word, yet Jacob struggled to remember whether he’d ever earned it from anyone else in his life, even once, and came up utterly empty.

Roth called him many things after that, but it was not so much the words as the faith and the pure delight at the trouble they stirred up together that left their mark. It made Jacob breathless, like he was racing to keep up rather than always running in headfirst, with Father or Evie behind him yelling to slow down and _think, for once._ He did think, and that had always been his problem: too fast, too restless. Roth, however, seemed to think exactly the same as he did in so many ways. Instead of coming head-to-head, they worked in tandem, the Rook and the Blighter opposed in the streets but united against Starrick.

Jacob wasn’t used to this sort of partnership; he and Evie worked well together—they always had—but they challenged each other. Everything she would have said no to, Roth met with an eager _why not?_

Those times were full of wonder and bewildered fascination and philosophizing, even, and once—just once—Jacob found himself thinking of how staunchly Father would have disapproved of this. He would have disapproved of Roth, he would have disapproved of their ends and their means; he would have disapproved of Jacob himself because it had become reflexive by the end of his life. For once, it did not matter. Jacob was his own man—and, for once, someone saw it.

 

**II.     games**

The factory did not feel like bravery. It felt like a sickness, one that left violent nausea in his belly and a taste of poison on his tongue, sharp and choking—though perhaps that was from the smoke. The smoke seemed as though it would never leave his lungs.

Jacob stood watching the flames for what felt like half an age, so bright they danced in his eyes and so hot he could feel the air on his skin like he was still in there. He hadn’t hesitated, because he never hesitated. Headfirst. No time to dwell on his disgust, his disappointment, the sickening pull of betrayal. The children were all that mattered, then, the innocent lives he was meant to protect; Roth’s rage, and his own, were secondary.

He could not tell whether he was already shaking when he was handed the box, or it was the box that made him shake. Roth’s hand on the paper was like a voice in his head, like the claws of a raptor around his throat, and it gripped him tighter and screamed when he peered inside the box and met the lifeless black eye of that young crow. Once free, then caged; now dead.

His horror was quiet, but his rage, driven by sorrow and fear he wouldn’t admit to, was not so. Stormy steps took him up that alley, the rhythm of them a fatal chorus of _one of us will die, one of us will die, one of us will die before I’m the one in that cage._ He all but stumbled through the door of the fight club hiding in plain sight nearby, and today he had no cordial words for Topping as he began to take off his gear unprompted.

“Put me in that ring,” he said, forming the words around the taste of smoke, his voice raw. From the coughing, he told himself. It was the coughing.

Topping saw the intensity that clung to him and it translated to sterling in his mind, as it always did, and so he was happy to oblige. Jacob let the rumble of the fighting quiet everything inside him that he didn’t want to hear and did the one thing he was truly good at: he fought and fought and _fought,_ fingers digging into muscle, knuckles cracking bones, until the sweat washed the soot off his face and he couldn’t smell the smoke on him anymore. The tang of blood replaced what lingered of the flames; red, always red, like the faded crimson of a Blighter flag hanging from the rafters, looming over him.

He fought some more and thought, distantly, that he would have that flag taken down if it meant burning the place—

No. That wasn’t him.

He stopped. The fighting went on without him.

Jacob sat on a bench amidst the dizzying sea of noise and sniffed, wiping the blood under his nose with the back of his hand. Looking down at his chest, he saw drops of red splattered across the outstretched wing of the bird on his skin, flying free. He wiped his hand across it, too, and thought of the baby crow in the box.

He knew what he was going to have to do, tomorrow—but for now, he let the rush take him until he realized his entire body ached.

*******

Evie was asleep in her armchair when he stepped onto the train from the near-empty platform at St. Pancras, so weary his muscles shook as he moved. The book in her hand was still half-open and dangerously close to falling; he took the book, kept her page with a loose pressed flower lying forgotten on the table beside her, and set it down. His own gentleness surprised him, as though he’d forgotten he was even capable of it after a night like this. Evie did not stir, and he did not linger.

He hopped over to the next car and stood before the board Henry had helped him set up at the very beginning, his gaze passing over every thread that connected to Starrick. Nearly all of them, he had broken, but for one: the Blighters, with their hold over every part of London, still too strong over the Rooks to his taste when this began. Roth had almost made him forget that. He looked at the letter he’d pinned beside the map: that very first dinner invitation that he and Evie had both scoffed at before he went ahead and decided to go anyway, because he was reckless and impulsive and so intent on charging towards his goals that he didn’t think of the consequences.

_The chance to have a little fun with the bravest man in London._

Jacob gritted his teeth and pointedly did not reach into the pocket inside his jacket for the new note—the one Roth had sent with the box containing his _invitation_ —even though it would have gone on the board, had it come from any other target. But it hadn’t. He couldn’t leave it there, _my dearest Jacob_ and all, for Evie and Henry and every passing Rook to see, so instead he rummaged around his things until he found a photograph of Roth he remembered seeing among the various files Henry had sent over. He pinned it to the board so mechanically it was almost as though it were only some prick like Twopenny or Cardigan he was only too happy to remove from Starrick’s power.

Tomorrow, he would be crossing it out in red, as he did all the others—or it would give Evie a path to Roth, if he somehow didn’t come out of this alive. If he managed to bungle this up, too, she would clean up his mess with her eyes closed, he knew.

He couldn’t tell what was worse about that thought, between Evie ending Roth’s life— _it has to be me,_ he thought bitterly—or Roth doing so much as laying eyes or a finger on his sister. Not after all of this. Would he call her dear, too, or was that a privilege and a curse reserved only for him?

He’d get no answers tonight, and likely not tomorrow, either. Moving heavily, his limbs as though through molasses, he grabbed a thick wool blanket off of his sofa and went back into the next car to lay it over Evie, tucking it around her shoulders snugly. Maybe she’d think it was Henry who had done it, when she woke; maybe it was better that she did, to bring her closer to him. She would need him if the rift between she and Jacob were to grow.

As he fell onto the sofa, Jacob almost wished Agnes was around to ask if they had a bottle of laudanum on hand. He hurt like the devil.

 

**III.     stage**

The Alhambra was burning, and Jacob felt numb. Yet his lungs were raw from the smoke and every inch of him ached from the tension and the fighting—he knew that, distantly, as though there was a wall of flame between his mind and his body.

For a moment, through the horror and the anger and the twisting, crippling, slithering sorrow, he had truly thought Roth and his thrice-damned theatre were going to take him with them. Hellfire and damnation, all sealed with a bloody kiss.

_How could you do this how could you do this howcouldyoudothis—_

Jacob forced himself to breathe as he watched the flames shatter the windows, the lights bursting in the letters that spelled the Alhambra’s name on its façade. Chaos and destruction: that was Roth’s legacy. Jacob thought that it would come to be his, too; it already was. He’d done so much wrong, _too_ much, and the only thing that had kept the whole city from crashing down because of him was Evie.

The bravest man in London, indeed.

Around him, Leicester Square was still spinning out of control, but Jacob stood frozen in the cool night air that the fire slowly corrupted with smoke and heat. _Darling, what a night!_

He couldn’t be sure what it was that made him want to be ill; he couldn’t even tell whether he was most furious and disgusted at Roth or himself. At long last, he made himself turn away from the flames and walked shakily to the fountain to dip his hands in the water. He made no effort to wash the blood off of his hands, but he splashed his face until he felt like it was his own again and his eyes stopped watering from the smoke. He passed the edge of his sleeve over his nose and mouth, still so tender from the fight club, and he didn’t want to think of being kissed and tasting the metal of his own blade.

He made to sit on the edge of the fountain; instead, he slid down until he was on the ground, his knees folded towards his chest and his back against cold stone. He took off his hat and ran his hands through his hair, his whole body fidgeting restlessly as he sniffed and fought back pointless, childish tears. He pressed his fingers into his eyelids and struggled for breath. The last time he’d been like this, it had been after Father died, but Evie had been next to him, her legs stretched out and her shoulders slumping from the shock and the grief. She had reached for his hand and held it so tightly he’d thought she was going to break his fingers.

Jacob didn’t know how to be alone in this, but he didn’t know how to be with her anymore, either, and certainly not with the ghost of Maxwell Roth filling every little space he’d left open inside himself to linger between them.

*******

It wasn’t until nearly dawn that Jacob returned to the train—in the blue hour of twilight, as the painters called it. He sat on the empty platform at St. Pancras again for the better part of an hour before the familiar locomotive came in, and by then he could barely feel his own legs as they stretched out before him. There was a pinkish line of sunlight hugging the horizon. He watched it reach higher, inch by inch, so weary that his gaze was distant and his mind blank; he didn’t have it in him to find it pretty.

He could only be glad that it wasn’t red, but then he was standing in front of his board and dipping a brush into the red ink to smear a cross over the photograph of Roth, the leader of the Blighters, the last line of defense Crawford Starrick had that wasn’t himself. In the end, it hadn’t been much of a defense—Roth was, to his last, in it only for chaos and for Maxwell Roth. Jacob had learned that the hard way.

Defeated, Jacob went to bury his left hand in his pocket, only to find that it wasn’t empty. He pulled out a mask, gilded and glimmering, hard and blank. He didn't remember picking it up. Part of him wanted to walk out of the car and toss it out onto the rails, but instead he cut a new length of twine—red, red, always more red—and wrapped it around the nose, through the eyes, to pin beside the map of London. The curtain had fallen. So, too, would the Blighters.

Jacob breathed, again and again, and wondered if he would ever feel once more what it was to breathe without agony burning through his chest. Sleeping was hell, too, even though he’d come to find the train’s vibrations and stops comforting. He lay unmoving on his back and slipped in and out of the fog. So many times that he lost count, he woke with flames in his mind and the lingering resistance in his hand of his blade slicing through flesh and a cold, bloodied mouth against his. Dawn had barely passed him by, pale and grim behind a grey-white sky, but it still felt as though he’d been restless through a night-long fever.

Henry came aboard and found him staring blankly at the board from the couch; it turned his gaze to the new photograph. “The leader of the Blighters is dead, then?” he asked, his surprise passing smoothly over his face. Jacob didn’t blame him for having missed it, with how fast it had all happened.

“Do you know me to get ahead of myself, Greenie?” Jacob said. It was meant to be sarcasm, to point out that he had no reason to mark a target as dead before the fact, but he was so, so tired and it came out all wrong. Henry could all too easily answer in the affirmative, especially if he’d been basing his impressions of him on Evie’s word as much as what he saw for himself.

Henry opened his mouth. Before he could speak, Jacob rolled over onto his side, so painfully he almost wanted to scream, and faced the window. “Don’t answer that,” he said.

“Good work,” Henry said uncertainly to his back. His steps were quiet on the plush carpet Agnes had bought as he walked to the next car.

It had been too personal to be work—too strangely, uncomfortably intimate—and it certainly hadn’t been good, but Henry was probably more concerned with what mess Jacob’s actions had unleashed this time, anyhow.

 

**IV.     jokes**

Jacob had liked the songs, before. It might have been that he liked the drinking, mostly: the laughing with his Rooks, arms around each other’s shoulders as they swayed happily to the music, the triumphant brandishing of their bottles and tankards as they sang along. He liked being a part of something that wasn’t the Frye name or the Brotherhood, and this was something he had built himself; he was a part of London as London had become a part of him.

If London’s way of toasting him for ridding it of the people who poisoned its streets was a lively ditty to help send them to Hell where they belonged, it was only fair that Jacob should sing along.

The one about Pearl had felt a little distasteful, perhaps, but he’d sung anyway. He didn’t feel so inclined towards being a proper and respectful young gentleman for the sake of a woman who had manipulated and used him and delighted in it to Starrick. It had hurt Jacob’s pride, certainly, but his disdain for her felt righteous because he had needed to make it up to the Brotherhood for his carelessness. If he had his way, no one would ever know of it—not Henry, not George, and _certainly_ not Evie—but for Father, if he was looking down on him and clicking his tongue the way he did when his footing was too heavy.

Still, it felt like a lesson: delight in the poetic nature of an Assassin aiding the Templars by some underhanded machinations, and meet your end at the point of the Assassin’s blade.

So he sang along and welcomed that the people should use Pearl’s death for their amusement like she had used him for hers, and it did not keep him from sleeping at night by any means. It was a good, properly cheeky song, besides.

They wrote one for Roth, too, but to this one, he did not sing along. He’d been doing his damnedest to be himself again since that cursed nightmare of an evening, to find the same satisfied irreverence in his advancement as with everyone else—it almost worked. Still, there was always something empty, and yet so heavy, that stubbornly kept a semblance of normalcy just out of his reach.

As he drank, he half expected Evie to burst in and tell him some institution or other had fallen apart because of him again, but the only thing that was crumbling without Roth was the Blighters. The Blighters, and the part of Jacob Frye he’d built up with admiration and terms of endearment. It was to their advantage, this time, that the Blighters should be crippled like this. And Jacob wouldn't let anyone see him bleed.

The folks at the pub, they sang of Maxwell Roth as they had everyone else before him, because they didn’t know and they _couldn’t_ know what it cost the man who had cut the rope and put the blade through his neck. Jacob listened, tense and queasy, but he couldn’t sit through it. The piano felt like an erratic heartbeat, the words drenched in overly chipper poison, and then—

“—and Maxwell Roth, he then received a very bad review!”

Jacob snatched his hat up, slammed a banknote—not counterfeit, thanks to Evie and none to him—down on the table, and left.

*******

“And I am sorry this doesn’t involve something you can destroy,” Evie said.

For a moment Jacob’s ears filled with the thundering roar of fire, again. Like it wasn’t enough, or perhaps because she didn’t know her words drove home something too painful that he already knew, she cut deeper: Father.

Of course Father had never approved of his methods or much of him; that wasn’t new information. But Father was dead, and so was the only man who’d ever shown him approval. Evie was what remained.

 _Father was right,_ she said.

It hurt worse than it did whenever their father called him reckless, and it hurt worse than it had when he finally opened his eyes and saw the sort of man Roth truly was. Evie was still here, but she would soon be gone.

Jacob couldn’t even resent her for it; he had only himself to blame.

 

**V.     rook and queen**

The mission did not wait for him to stop feeling miserable; perhaps that was his saving grace.

When Abberline met up with him in the royal guard’s uniform, the ridiculous bearskin hat in his hands, there was something in Jacob that leapt for joy for the first time since the Alhambra. No matter everything he said, all the necessary chastising that his position demanded of him, Freddy seemed to trust him—and Jacob had never, for one second, thought to distrust him.

(Not that it was a mark of his good judgement, all things like Pearl Attaway and Maxwell Roth considered, but Freddy was the better man. Of that, Jacob was certain.)

Like the Rooks, it felt like he had finally built something that was meant to last. Even amidst the chaos and the destruction left in his wake, he had a few things that were solid and steady and that he didn’t owe to Evie or Henry or his father or even George. All this was his, and he wasn't about to lose them like he was to lose Evie.

There was a moment—once, suddenly, one fleeting impression—where that delighted _something_ made him want to grab Freddy’s face and kiss him. What stopped him wasn’t shame: it was that he didn’t want to force it the way Roth had forced his blood onto his lips. If it were to come to pass, better it happen by meeting halfway, somewhere between words of charming sarcasm and reprimands made out of habit, so steeped in familiarity that they only came as half-hearted.

Shame wasn’t for irreverent fools like him. For once, it felt comforting to be so.

*******

Jacob was tired of choking because of Roth’s smoke, and now Starrick’s hands. As he dragged himself back to his feet shaking, knowing that Evie would need him to fight in her stead like she fought in his, he heard Starrick speak: “The rook falls, and now the queen.”

Those disdainful words echoed through the vault. They broke through the clamour of the unrelenting battle between Starrick and Evie, rang in Jacob's ears in the spaces between his coughing and his ragged breathing. Starrick's voice was so smooth, so soft even when it was so sharp, and so utterly _pretentious._

Jacob almost wanted to laugh, and he wondered if Evie did, too. Had the situation been any other, Evie may very well have primly informed Starrick that it was no use making any sort of reference to chess where her brother was concerned.

When they cut the Shroud free from his shoulders, Evie's blade buried itself deep in Starrick’s chest. “Queen takes knight,” Jacob hissed. His own blade followed—a mere four seconds later—and Evie said, low and dark, before Jacob was even finished speaking: “Rook takes knight.”

They looked at each other and wrenched their blades out in tandem; Evie stepped away, and Jacob caught Starrick to lower him down on the ground. They stood over him and heard his dying words together. It was done.

When they were outside again, eyes squinting in the bright early morning light, Jacob was smiling as though everything had washed away with a tide that had seemed like it might never come. He’d meant it when he told Evie he’d missed her, more than anything he had ever said in his life—and now they were at each other's side again, as it always had been. Evie had Henry at her arm and Jacob was without smoke in his lungs.

He could breathe.

The knighting was secondary in his mind when he glanced sideways, still kneeling, and saw Evie gazing not at Henry but _past_ him. She was looking at him, her little brother, with a smile and a light in her eyes so bright she didn’t even need to speak for him to feel it to the bottom of his spirit.

But she still spoke, coming to his side again as the queen's carriage rolled away.

“Father would be proud of you,” Evie said, her hand steady on his shoulder and her smile gentle. She meant it, too.

Jacob smiled back, but said nothing. Perhaps he would be; perhaps not; perhaps any pride Father might have felt would only be a product of that which he had for Evie, not for him. As he stood beside his sister, Jacob found that it didn’t matter so much to him anymore what their father would have thought; he was dead and gone and Jacob had tortured himself overmuch with the dead, by now.

He heard the pride in Evie’s voice, saw it in her eyes. That was more than enough.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! ❤ drop me a line if you'd like, and you can also check my [twitter](https://twitter.com/hornywarlocks) to see my descent into loving syndicate more than i ever thought i might leading to the decision to write this. i wrote too many threads about jacob's feelings, probably. it's something.


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